July 20, 2026
Big Map Energy
The footprints of every building in NYC – updated weekly
NYC mapped every building weekly, and commenters instantly found a thing to fight about
TLDR: New York City now updates a public map of more than 1 million building footprints every week, offering a rare look at how fast the city changes. Commenters were split between being genuinely impressed and getting hilariously hung up on a weird referral link and the shocking fact that so many structures are garages.
New York City is out here doing the most: officials now update a giant public map of every tracked building in the city every single week. We’re talking more than 1.08 million buildings across the five boroughs, from tiny old houses to giant glass towers, all measured mostly from photos taken in the air and on the street. The wildest detail? Nearly a quarter of the buildings still standing today were built in the 1920s, and somehow one in five structures is a garage — a stat that made at least one commenter do a full double take.
But, naturally, the comments turned this neat data story into a mini internet drama. One reader skipped right past the urban-history wonder and went straight for the site’s linking habits, calling out the article for doing a “nutzo” thing by adding a referral tag to outgoing links instead of just dropping the direct dataset link. That’s classic comment-section energy: yes, the city has a weekly-updated map of almost every building in America’s biggest city, but first, let’s discuss the URL crimes. Another commenter brought the opposite vibe — pure delight — saying they work with NYC open data and still didn’t know this dataset existed. Translation: even the data people are finding surprises in this thing.
So the mood was a fun split between “this is amazing” and “why is the link weird?” with a side order of garage disbelief. Honestly, that’s the perfect New York story: massive civic achievement, tiny online beef, and everyone arguing in front of a spreadsheet.
Key Points
- •As of July 13, 2026, New York City’s weekly updated building-footprint dataset contains 1,082,974 tracked buildings.
- •The dataset includes structures over 400 square feet and taller than 12 feet, while excluding temporary and minor structures such as tents, scaffolds, and backyard storage sheds.
- •About 93% of building measurements are generated using photogrammetry based on aerial and ground-level imagery, with OTI stating that 95% of footprint data is accurate to within plus or minus two feet.
- •Construction-date data exists for 99% of buildings in the dataset, and nearly one-quarter of currently existing NYC buildings in the dataset were built in the 1920s.
- •New York City also maintains a separate "Building Historic" dataset for demolished or significantly altered buildings, complementing the current building-footprint data.